Mark Fry

English psychedelic folk songwriter Mark Fry is best known for his 1972 acid folk classic Dreaming with Alice, his debut recording and an album widely considered one of the brightest creations of the acid folk genre in its early days. Fry was born in the small British town of Epping to a family descended from successful chocolatiers. After attending school in the U.K. he went on to study painting in Italy, where he met producer Vincenzo Micocci. Micocci was taken with Fry's compositions and immediately signed him to his IT Dischi label, an Italian subsidiary of RCA. A session band was assembled to record the songs that became Dreaming with Alice in the summer of 1971, and Fry did a few gigs around Italy shortly after the sessions. The album came out in 1972 and Fry continued to play music and travel, eventually returning to London in the early '80s to pursue a career as a visual artist. While he grew his profile as a painter, his sole record achieved an enormous cult following, with lovers of obscure psych folk spreading the word about this rare gem, only ever available in Italy. As the album became more and more emblematic of the acid folk genre, prices for original copies rose, some online auctions finding single copies of Dreaming with Alice going for thousands of dollars. Fry, having spent several decades focusing on painting, returned to music in the 2000s, learning of the reputation Dreaming with Alice had gained. In 2006, the first of what would be several reissues of the album appeared on Sunbeam Records, and in 2008 Fry released second album Shooting the Moon. In 2011 he released I Lived in Trees, a collaborative album credited to Mark Fry and the A. Lords, composed by Fry and be Nicholas Palmer and Michael Tanner. Fry would play live much more during this time than he had in the decades prior, touring Japan and releasing the recordings from three Tokyo concerts as the 2013 album Mark Fry Live in Japan. A record of all new material followed the next year with South Wind, Clear Sky. ~ Fred Thomas, Rovi